*[http://www.voanews.com/english/podcasts.cfm Voice of America podcasts] Good site for presidential broadcasts with texts.

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*[[Voice of America | Voice of America podcasts]] Good site for presidential broadcasts with texts.

===Generalised searches===

===Generalised searches===

Revision as of 13:42, 14 February 2009

A podcast is an audio file which may be obtained on the internet.

You may well be able to use a podcast in class but you should be aware of any copyright issues if you do. Our article: Copyright in English language teaching may help you to decide what action your are allowed to take in your particular jurisdiction.

Sometimes, when attempting to download a podcast you will find the download hijacked by a program such as "quicktime". The solution is probably to look at your various file associations - but this can be time consuming. Another solution is to use a free program such as "downloadhelper".[1] which will not only enable you to get around this problem, but may help you to obtain other difficult-to-download media as well. This only works with firefox but it also allows you to automatically change the the format of the downloaded file.

Free English Teaching Podcasts

Video

Finding video material is actually easier than finding audio material. The simplest method is simply to go to Google, enter a search term and select "video" in the top left. A tool such as "Orbit downloader" should let you obtain it as a .flv file. These files can be played with VLC media player. One problem with .flv files played in this way is that VLC frequently freezes when you want to move earlier and later in a ,Flv file.

A site such as FLV to MP3 Online Converter will let you convert the audio part of .flv to files to .mp3 on-line. Alternatively use downloadhelper which is a friefox extension which will allow you to download and convert in one step.

Useful language podcasts

Playing back podcasts

When playing podcasts you will frequently want to to move to a particular point in the recording. The winamp media player allows you to specify the point at which you ant to start playing by pressing "Ctrl J".